You have finally overcome the exhausting process of a successful paper publication and just thinking it is time to relax for a while. Maybe you are right to do so, but don’t take very long… You see, just like the research process itself; pursuing a career as an author of published work is also expecting results and learn to take conclusions upon them: in other words, today there are tools that can tell you if your publication(s) is/are impacting the amount of people you believed it would or not. One of the most common ones is the H-index score.
Knowing how impactful your publications are among your audience is key to define your individual performance as researcher and author, hence helping the scientific community to compare professionals in the same research field and career length. Although scoring intellectual activities is often an issue of debate, it also brings its own benefits:
- Inside the scientific community: A standardization of researchers’ performances can be useful for comparison between them within their field of research. For example, H-indexes are commonly part of recruitment processes for academic positions and taken into consideration when applying for academic or research grants. At the end of the day, H-index is used as a sign of self-worth for scholars of almost every field of research.
- In an individual point of view: Knowing the impact output of one’s work among the target audience is especially important in the academic world. With careful analysis and the right amount of reflection, it can give you signs regarding how to carry on future projects. If your paper is not being cited as much as you expected, try to find out what the problem could have been: was the research content irrelevant for the audience? Was the selected journal wrong for your paper? Was the text poorly written? For the latter, consider Elsevier’s text editing and translation services in order to improve your chances of being cited by other authors and improve your H-index.
What is my H-index?
Basically, the H-index score is a standard scholarly metric in which the number of published papers and the number of times their author is cited is put into relation. The formula is based on the number of papers (H) that have been cited H times and the other papers have no more than H citations each. See the table below as a practical example:
| Publication | > | Times Cited | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | > | 79 | |
| 2 | > | 71 | |
| 3 | > | 45 | |
| 4 | > | 36 | |
| 5 | > | 10 | |
| 6 | > | 7 | H-index=6 |
| 7 | > | 6 | |
| 8 | > | 3 | |
| 9 | > | 1 |
In this case, the researcher scored an H-index of 6, since he has 6 publications that have been cited at least 6 times. The remaining articles, those that have not yet reached 6 citations, are left aside.
A good H-index score depends not only on a prolific output but also on a large number of citations by other authors. It is important, therefore, that your research reaches a wide range of audience, preferably one to whom your topic is particularly interesting or relevant, in a clear, high-quality text. Young researches and unexperienced scholars often look for articles that offer academic security by leaving no room for doubts or misinterpretations.
What is a good H-Index score journal?
Journals also have their own H-Index scores. Publishing in a high H-index journal maximizes your chances of being cited by other authors and consequently may improve your own personal H-index score. Some of the “giants” in the highest H-index scores are scholars in top Universities such as Oxford University with the highest score being 146, according to Google Scholar.
Knowing the H-index score of journals of interest is useful when searching for the right one to publish your next paper. Even if you are just starting as an author and you still don’t have your own H-index score, you may want to start in the right place to skyrocket your self-worth.
See below some of the most commonly used databases which help authors find their H-index values:
- Elsevier’s Scopus: Includes Citation Tracker, a feature that shows how often an author has been cited. To this day, it is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.
- Clarivate Analytic’s Web of science: a digital platform that provides the H-index with its Citation Reports feature
- Google Scholar: a growing database that calculates H-index scores for those you have a profile.
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